Moonlight 1.0 is released!

Great news – the full Moonlight 1.0 has been released. I talked about the beta back in the fall. We used the beta for the Presidential Inauguration, (further details in this Channel 9 interview). Moonlight is an open source implementation of Silverlight, built from the public specifications, based on the Mono project from Novell.

Miguel de Icaza’s blog has the full details and well worth the read. A few key points:

• This is an implementation of Silverlight 1.0. Thus it has
  • XAML for drawing the user interface
  • Browser JavaScript for application logic (no managed code yet)
  • Media Features
• The codec and file format support is distributed by Microsoft as a binary module that plugs into Moonlight. Users will be prompted to install it the first time they try to play back media. This allows for Microsoft to cover patent license fees associated with the codecs.
• Since we based that module on Silverlight 2 , this includes the VC-1 decoder improvements from Silverlight  2, and WMA 10 Pro.
• Moonlight is available in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions.

Now the team is moving on to Moonlight 2.0 and Silverlight 2 compatibility, which is currently in pre-alpha. The big work item there is getting the CLR/DLR fully integrated. Once we get that, we’ll have Smooth Streaming working on Linux! As an open source project, they’re welcoming help.

And here’s my favorite Moonlight project I just heard about: Moonshine. It uses Moonlight to emulate the old Windows Media Player OCX embedding model, so that web pages targeting the old player can work in Firefox on Linux. It can also play back local WMV files. Given that VLC hasn’t be able to play back VC-1 content with B-frames, I’m very glad for this.

Screenshot of Moonlight (taken from their page. I still need to get the new SUSE installed; my computers have all been encoding full blast since December).